Several years ago, I ordered a thalipeeth at a popular Maharashtrian restaurant in Mumbai. Having grown up eating my mother’s pan-roasted version of this savoury pancake (with a dollop of unsalted butter), I was aghast at the deep-fried flatbread that was set in front of me. On a telephonic chat, food writer and culinary consultant Saee Koranne-Khandekar echoes my aversion. “The commercial interpretations of it are all wrong! The bhajani (multi-grain flour mix) is slow-roasted and has a certain flavour and texture that is completely lost when you deep-fry the thalipeeth ”, she says.
Her own experiences with what passes for Maharashtrian cuisine in restaurants led her to think about how it is interpreted in general. “I realised that there are people in Maharashtra who don’t know what the rest of Maharashtra eats i.e. the Konkan doesn’t know what the Vidarbha eats and vice versa. And I felt that I didn’t know enough either. This is around the time that I set up the Facebook group Angat-Pangat (2015), which started with the idea of finding out what I didn’t know and in the bargain I unearthed a lot of hidden gems”, elaborates Koranne-Khandekar. Her quest to discover and document Maharashtrian cuisine led to her third book Pangat, A Feast , which released late last year. Koranne-Khandekar’s first book Crumbs demystifies the art of baking while her second book The Gore Family Cookbook records heirloom recipes of her extended family.
Taste of Maharashtra
Pangat features more than 200 recipes, ranging from a variety of masalas, chutneys, and pickles to breakfast dishes, seafood and meat delicacies, fasting items, and desserts. Browsing through the book invokes pangs of nostalgia (for me) – when was the last time I ate dhondas (cucumber cake)? But the real beauty of the book lies in the initial sections where Koranne-Khandekar elaborates upon the five regions of Maharashtra – Konkan, Khandesh, Vidarbha, Marathwada, and Desh – and their cuisines. She also adds a primer of the major Maharashtrian communities and what makes their cuisine similar yet different. “For example, if you look at a recipe for karanji there’s a basic recipe but there are also versions that you can do like a Pathare Prabhu version or a CKP version. Essentially they are all karanjis but they are made differently across Maharashtra. I wanted to show that Maharashtrian cuisine is not a monolith, there are so many sub-cuisines”, she explains.
Digging deep
My favourite section is the one on traditional utensils and cooking equipment, which Koranne-Khandekar prefaces with memories of her bhatukli set (miniature kitchen set for children). “I really wanted the chapter on utensils in. Nowadays if you look at an average kitchen whether it is Marathi or otherwise, you start and end with non-stick cookware – one kadahi , one pan, one pressure cooker, and you’re pretty much done, all your cooking happens in that. But there’s a reason why we use so many different utensils and I wanted to record them if not for anything else but for archival value”, she elaborates.
While Pangat covers Maharashtrian cuisine across regions and communities, another book released last year delves into Marathwada cuisine. UK-based food blogger Preeti Deo’s Paat Paani is a compendium of family recipes and techniques, including the typical Marathwada penchant for using vaalvan or sundried produce as well as valvat or assorted hand-rolled pasta. So is there scope for more cookbooks drilling deeper into regional Maharashtrian cuisine? “Definitely”, says Koranne-Khandekar, adding that one untapped territory is tribal cuisine. “The tribes in the Konkan region eat very differently from those in the interiors of Maharashtra depending upon the local topography, produce, and the forests. I feel there’s scope for a research-based cookbook on this”, she says.
Universal language
Another requirement is for regional cookbooks to be written in English. “I get a lot of hate mail on the Facebook group saying that you’re a group about Maharashtrian cuisine and you’re talking in English, you should be ashamed of yourself”, says Koranne-Khandekar. But she reasons that if you continue to talk in Marathi, you’re only talking to a certain set of audience who already probably has half-knowledge about the cuisine. “What about people from outside the state who are actually misinterpreting the cuisine to be vada pao, misal pao and veg Kolhapuri? I think writers need to be a little more open to the idea of talking about their regional cuisine in a universal language”, she adds.
Even the bible of Maharashtrian cooking, Ruchira by Kamalabai Ogale first published in Marathi in 1970, was released in English in 2013. While the English Ruchira was a passable version of the original (it has fewer recipes and some things are definitely lost in translation), it’s a good starting point for novices to experiment with Maharashtrian cuisine. Another book due in December 2019 is The Classic Konkan Cookbook by Jyotsna Shahane. The Pune-based food writer and filmmaker has transformed a 1960s Konkani cookbook by Narayani V Nayak into a contemporary English-language anthology that makes Konkani cuisine accessible to all. Koranne-Khandekar herself doesn’t rule out a Pangat 2.0 . “ Pangat does not contain all the recipes and essays that I originally planned to include; we had to cut down a whole lot. If I had my way it would be an additional 200 pages at least”, she laughs.
Pangat, A Feast ; Saee Koranne-Khandekar, Hachette India, ₹ 599
